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Importance of frequent vs rarer words? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Lucie Tellier Diglot Newbie France Joined 3252 days ago 21 posts - 27 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 1 of 81 05 June 2015 at 12:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've mostly been using thematic lists, but I probably should have selected the important words within the list. I was under the impression that I would eventually either finish studying the vocabulary book entirely or learn the missing "common" words elsewhere, but it never happened.
In my experience, learning words haphazardly like I've been doing has several drawbacks. I've realised today that while I know some words that are rare, my understanding of some of the most frequent words is still fuzzy... or nonexistent. Until yesterday, I was pretty much convinced that one word was "worth" exactly the same no matter its meaning and frequency. While in theory it's true, as the next text I read might contain that word, in my humble opinion this way of thinking is flawed. I'm pretty horrified at the thought that I still have huge gaps in my written and spoken understanding of English just because I didn't use the right method to learn vocabulary. Do you have any advice to help me make up for lost time vocabulary-wise? I guess I should either ignore most of the flashcards I made in the past and start afresh keeping only a few words, or I should make brand-new cards, which would take more time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6379 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 81 05 June 2015 at 2:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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Your English is really good, what kind of vocab do you have gaps in? I remember how at 16 I first learned the word destination in English while looking up the Finnish equivalent. I try not to feel bad about this kind of thing. In a way it's fascinating how a perfectly common word may escape your attention.
Do you read books and watch TV in English? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4791 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 81 05 June 2015 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What vocabulary to learn, that depends always on your goals and time you've got.
Thematic lists are awesome when it comes to learning vocabulary you could easily need when staying in the country. And that tends to be vocabulary you won't find in frequency dictionaries, most literature or movies. However, an approach you suggest, learn the few most important pieces from the list first and leave the rest for later is a totally valid strategy. For the rest, huge amounts of native input are a great help in learning what is trully needed, from my experience. Some people use frequency lists and consider frequent=improtant and useful. Well, not always. A frequency list based on newspapers (a common source for corpora used for such lists' creation) may not include tons of words you need for other purposes than news reading and vice versa. So: No single source is perfect and you'll always need to combine. What vocabulary book have you been using? I agree with Serpent it might be time you incorporated more native resources in your learning. Or good old fashioned time consuming reading of a dictionary and learning words you consider useful and don't know yet. You are already advanced in English enough to know the best what are YOU likely to ever need. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4315 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 81 06 June 2015 at 11:18am | IP Logged | |||||
^^^^^THIS^^^^^ 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3674 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 5 of 81 06 June 2015 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My comment is based on the fact that your English is already on a decent level.
"Frequent words" vary from person to person. There are some things I never speak about - music, for example. So the vocabulary that is needed to discuss this subject is "infrequent" for me. For someone who is playing bass in an orchestra in London, such vocabulary will be "frequent" indeed. If you like discussing politics with everyone you meet, or gourmet foods, or language learning methods, then that's the kind of vocabulary that is "frequent" for you. In certain areas my English vocabulary is quite good, but today I had to use Google image search to understand what the hell is a "blazer". Turns out it's what I have always thought of as a jacket. Apparently, I had never needed this word before. So, no matter how high or low on general word frequency list it is, it's an "infrequent" word for me. Keep on reading the books you read, watching the programs and movies you watch, and based on what you're interested in and likely to talk about, you'll learn YOUR frequent words. A more practical approach is, when ever you find a word you don't know and can't guess, look it up in a dictionary (I started doing it only after buying an e-book reader with built in dictionary look-up), preferably with pronunciation as well. If you are chatting to people and don't know a certain word (I used to not know what you call those little annoying coffee bits in the bottom of the coffee cup - that's coffee dregs, as it turned out) then do not feel shy to ask, or, if you're chatting to another non-native who also does not know, just google it :) It helps! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3324 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 6 of 81 06 June 2015 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
As a native speaker I have never needed this word. Unless you work in a clothing store, I can't imagine a situation that requires one to use 'blazer', i.e. a situation where using 'jacket' would not do. That being said, you are expected to be able understand someone when he refers to a "man in a blazer". However, this is a good example where you don't need deep knowledge about the word to understand what it means. For example, if you're interested in the topic, you are of course at complete liberty to do an image search on "blazer", or to read about blazers and try to find out why people use that word and how one can distinguish between a blazer and a suit jacket. But all of that is too much. For 99.9% of purposes all you actually need to know is that 'blazer' is a word some people use to mean 'jacket'. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5018 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 7 of 81 06 June 2015 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
This word is MUCH more common in British English than American English. Mostly because of the use of school uniforms and suits. So another problem you have with frequency lists is which version of English do you want to speak? :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5212 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 81 07 June 2015 at 12:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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In yet another guise, we are seeing the same phenomenon that we have discussed endlessly here at HTLAL when
we look at receptive and productive vocabulary. What we know is that a very small number of word families account for a very large proportion of words used in written or spoken language. We see for example in Spanish that around 1000 words represent about 80% of all words in a corpus of spoken Spanish. This is text coverage. To get higher coverage, we have to increase the number of words considerably and geometrically. This is also a product of the way the corpora are constituted; they are the sum of many individual samples. Any sample may contain only a small number of different words, but all samples put together, we have many different words. What this means is that beyond the small number of very common words, the other words become nearly equally rare. In other words, the difference in probability between encountering word 10000 and word 30000 is not that great. This is why 100% coverage requires such enormous numbers of words. But, of course, depending on what you read, your actual requirements can be lot less. As we have seen here, there are people who have never seen 'blazer' and maybe never will; then there are people who hear it every day because they work in a men's haberdashery. In between these two extremes we have varying degrees of knowledge of this term, Now, the question here is: Should we make an effort to learn blazer, using maybe an SRS even though we have never encountered it? My position is no. We'll learn blazer when we run into it. Maybe we never will. If we need it we'll learn it. Edited by s_allard on 07 June 2015 at 12:46am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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